How to: Set up Custom Dashboards for PR and Campaigns

Within Brandwatch, Dashboards are the magic that turn data into insights. It’s with Dashboards that you can slice and dice your data, and get the real meaning from the numbers.

When you write a Query, you then create a Dashboard. You can choose a default Dashboard, which has some tabs already set up to show you the key insights such as a Summary, the top sites, authors, topics and mentions. There are also Channel-specific default Dashboards for Channels. You can then add to and customise these as you wish

Plus, now with our recent launch of the ‘new’ Brandwatch, you can also open a completely blank Dashboard, ready for you to start from scratch if you prefer – one for the power users among you

We’ve also recently added the ability to save your customised Dashboards as a template. You can then upload these as new Dashboards, and change them to any Query. This means if you make a really great template, you can then share it with colleagues or other teams, and they could use the same set up for their own Queries.

You can also duplicate dashboards directly in the app, if you want to copy them to the same project.

So, why might you set up custom Dashboards?

Well, the default Dashboard is great for getting some quick insights into your data. However, if you want to really dive deep into the data, or you have a specific use case, you’ll probably find that a custom Dashboard better suits your needs.

I’m going to write about some examples of Dashboard set ups for specific use cases that you might want to take inspiration from. Today, it’s PR and campaign tracking:

PR and campaign tracking

If you’re tracking multiple campaigns and wanting to measure the impact of them online, you will probably want to set up a custom Dashboard that lets you see data about those specific campaigns. The first step is to set up Rules, so that you can automatically categorise mentions according to which of your specific campaigns they pertain to – be that different pieces of content, different TV ads you’re running or any other type of PR and marketing you’re doing.

Then it’s time to get creating. In this example, we’ve got 5 tabs:

Campaigns: A chart showing buzz so far this year, but only showing mentions specifically about 5 different campaigns (which are each set up as categories). This allows us to see when campaigns peaked, which did better than others, which tailed off more quickly than others and so on. We can also choose to show all mentions (not just those about specific campaigns) if we wish.

News hits per campaign: Sometime, you’ll just want to know about news or blogs that have mentioned your campaign. We can separate this out using the page type filters, so here we can see only news and blog mentions about each of our campaigns. We also have this plotted over time in our Dashboard.

 

Social Buzz per campaign: This is the same idea as the above, except this time we’re removing news and blogs and just looking at mentions from social sites such as Facebook, Twitter and forums. That tells us which of our campaigns is resonating most with our audience and the general public. You could also break this down by sentiment if you wanted to delve deeper, and evaluate which of the campaigns created the most positive and negative feeling.

Table of campaigns: This is the number of social mentions and news mentions, as per the previous two tabs, per campaign. This lets us evaluate which campaigns have had most success in terms of traditional PR, and which have created the most social buzz.

For example, we can see that Campaign 3 was second most successful in terms of news coverage, but was only fourth most successful when it came to social buzz, suggesting that it resonated most with news outlets but didn’t cause as much excitement among the public.

Top press hits: This is a list of the top news and blogs sites that mentioned our brand this year, ordered by MozRank, so we can see what kind of coverage we’ve got, and which is likely to have the most impact.

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Hopefully, you can see how Dashboards can be customised to show you exactly what you need. This is a fairly basic example, but it shows how setting up some components using the filters and categories you need can quickly get you the insights you need.

Look out for more posts about setting up Dashboards – I’ll be discussing Dashboards for Customer Service and Competitor Benchmarking soon!